Notes
1 To Aleksei Suvorin junior. See 331 59 71a: A. A. Suvorin’s letter to Anton 8 Nov. 1888.
2 Anton was to encounter old Taganrogians all his life: Drs Eremeev, Saveliev, Shamkovich, Tarabrin, Valter, Zembulatov; lawyers (Kolomnin, Konovitser, Kramariov, the Volkenshteins, one of whom Anton saved from expulsion from school after an anti-Semitic incident); performing artists (Vishnev[ets]ky); writers (Sergeenko); academics, civil servants, even revolutionaries.
3 To V. A. Tikhonov in February 1892. The brothel was run by N. Pototsky, who left Taganrog gimnazia with a silver medal in 1862. Years later Aleksandr Chekhov still asked after Pototsky.
4 See OR, 331 32 3, Aleksandr’s letters to Anton, 1876: 27 Sept. 1876, printed in Pis’ma, 1939, 33–5.
5 See OR, 331 33 126: Evgenia’s 20 letters to Anton, 1876–1904.
EIGHT
Alone
1877–9
ANTON STARTED the seventh and penultimate class in August 1877, after a month with the Kravtsovs in the steppes at Ragozina Gully and some weeks with Ivan Selivanov, riding to outlying farms. Back in Taganrog, Anton lived in the old family house with Gavriil Selivanov and the Selivanov-Kravtsov offspring, Petia and Sasha. He wrote. He sent sketches and verses via Aleksandr to journals such as The Alarm Clock, signing himself ‘Nettles’. Some were rejected, all were lost.
In late 1877 and early 1878 Anton tried his hand at drama. (Even at fourteen he is reported dramatizing Gogol’s historical tale Taras Bulba.) At eighteen, he composed a farce The Scythe Strikes the Stone and a full-length drama, Fatherlessness. Fatherlessness is an appropriate title for his last years in Taganrog, but what the play was about we do not know.1 In October 1878 Aleksandr delivered his judgment on his brother’s work:
Two scenes in Fatherlessness are handled with genius, even, but on the whole it’s an unforgivable, if innocent lie … The Scythe Strikes the Stone is written in excellent language which is very typical for each character developed, but your plot is very shallow. The latter I said (for convenience) was mine and read it to friends … the answer was: ‘The writing is fine, it has skill, but little observation and no experience of life.’
What Anton read and saw in the 1870s we know from Taganrog’s library and theatre. Presumably, Pavel took to Moscow in 1876 his substantial collection of religious books. Anton’s own books give us few hints. Perhaps his books from the 1860s and 1870s were bought later; as a schoolboy he could afford little. Translations of Hamlet and Macbeth (1861–2) may be the first books Anton acquired. Hamlet looks like a schoolboy’s possession: the owner’s name is written five times, and it has pencil marks in the margins. A few books are numbered: a prayer book of 1855 is No. 63, Hamlet is No. 82; Macbeth No. 8 – No. 85, however, is a medical textbook published in 1881. Anton may as a boy have owned from youth Goethe’s Faust in a Russian version of 1871 and an 1803 Russian translation of Beccaria’s pioneering On Crimes and Punishments.2
Medicine, not literature, was the career he contemplated, and he wanted to go straight from Taganrog to Zürich university – the Mecca for Russian medical students. Aleksandr argued against this plan and gave Anton a guide to the universities of Russia, from the distinguished German university of Dorpat to the Armenian academy in Nakhichevan where they taught ‘hairdressing, shaving and cutting corns’. Aleksandr himself was happy in the science and mathematics faculty of Moscow university. He focused Anton’s ambitions on Moscow.
Anton was set on university; he announced to Aleksandr in June 1877 that he ‘sent all young ladies packing’. Aleksandr responded: ‘You shouldn’t be a skirt-chaser, but there’s no need to avoid women.’ The Taganrog theatre too lost its appeal, after the excitement of Moscow. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of its most successful stagings, seemed just a ‘tear-jerker’. Although the authorities removed some 300 ‘seditious’ books and journals in 1878, the Public Library was Anton’s lifeline, and his reading was now serious. He even advised his elder brothers to read Turgenev’s essay Don Quixote and Hamlet, a study of the Russian antihero which has a bearing on Chekhov’s own fictional heroes who would be, like Turgenev’s, either Quixotic men of action who do not think, or cerebral Hamlets who cannot act.
The pressure to send money to his family – and tobacco and cigarette paper to Aleksandr – did not relent. In return Anton asked for drawing instruments, but Aleksandr claimed that they were too expensive to send. He asked for Aleksandr’s chemistry notes, but Aleksandr said that they were beyond his understanding. He asked for logarithm tables, but Pavel could not afford a set.
Hope dawned in Moscow. Konstantin Makarov, a drawing teacher who had taken a liking to Anton in Easter 1877, invited Masha to a ball at the Moscow cadet school where he taught. There she met a pupil of the episcopal Filaret girls’ gimnazia. Masha followed her young brother Misha’s example. She went to ask the Bishop of Moscow for a free place, but the Bishop told her, ‘I’m not a millionaire’ and refused. A Taganrog colleague of Pavel’s, the merchant Sabinin, then took pity and offered to pay. She was quickly tutored for entry into the second year, and in August 1877 was accepted into the Filaret school. Misha, too, had found a benefactor: old Gavrilov paid his fees. Evgenia pawned her gold bracelets to pay the rent, but Pavel now had hopes of returning south. Another bankrupt merchant had returned to Taganrog, Mitrofan reported, and would start afresh; perhaps Pavel might do the same. Alms arrived: Pavel’s sister Aleksandra sent three roubles through Mitrofan; Father Filaret, treasurer of the Brotherhood, sent a rouble; an old colleague sent two. Finally, a member of the Taganrog administration hinted that if Pavel returned, he might have a clerical job at 600 roubles a year. In June 1877 Mitrofan was encouraging: ‘have faith that the Lord will not abandon you. Many people are suffering, but not Ivan Loboda and Gavriil Selivanov: those two will probably never be touched by poverty.’
Pavel was offered a clerical job by a church charity. Although he could compose a lament or a sermon, he could not write a memorandum and was dismissed. In their Moscow flat, at the end of September, he posted up a family roster:
Timetable of jobs and household obligations to be carried out in the family house of Pavel Chekhov, resident of Moscow. Where it is stated who is to get up, go to bed, dine, go to church and when, and what jobs to do in their free time, namely … Mikhail Chekhov, aged 11; Maria Chekhova, aged 14: Going to church without delay for all night Vigil at 7 p.m. and early Matins at 6.30 and late Matins at 9.30 on Sundays.
Misha had to ‘clean boots with a rag’, Masha ‘to comb her hair carefully’.
Those who do not obey this roster are liable first to a severe reprimand and then to punishment, during which crying out is forbidden. Father of the Family Pavel Chekhov.
Misha was beaten for oversleeping by eight minutes and not looking at the timetable. He was then instructed: ‘Get up and look at the timetable to see if it is time to get up and if it is too early, then go back to bed.’ A row blew up between Vania and Pavel over a pair of trousers: Aleksandr described it to Anton (1 November 1877):
The father of the family followed him and, in the Taganrog custom, started hitting him round the face. Offended by such cruel treatment, Member of the Family Ivan Chekhov, aged 17, opened his throat wide and called out as loud as he could. The landlord and landlady and the family members who ran towards the row shamed the Father of the Family and made him release the Member. Then the landlord and landlady made things very clear, pointing to the gate, while the Father of the Family smiled in the most innocent way …
Salvation came from old Gavrilov: on 10 November 1877, after seventeen months’ idleness, Pavel Chekhov was hired as a clerk. For 30 roubles a month, with free board and lodging, this ex-merchant, aged fifty-two, had to live like the shop boys, working from before dawn well into the night, with the ‘right’ to board and lodging on the premises (of which he usually availed himself). He could bring home sugar, which the family fed to Misha’s puppy, now Korbo the family dog. The roster was taken off the wall. Work in t
he warehouse stopped the quarrels at home; now the shop boys bore the brunt of Pavel’s lectures on how to trade and live. These earned him the name of ‘Teacher of Morals’. Pavel was no longer head of the household but a visiting relative, though he never accepted demotion. Evgenia wept less. Kolia worked at home for his gold medal; his best friend, a mortally consumptive artist Khelius (known as Nautilus), came to live with them. Kolia’s fame grew: he was now painting theatre sets for a wealthy patron.
In August Anton had written to Misha Chokhov asking him to lobby Gavrilov for Aleksei Dolzhenko. Old Gavrilov not only took on Pavel, but also subsidized Mikhail Chekhov’s schooling and promised Pavel’s nephew, Aleksei Dolzhenko, a place from February 1878. What had driven Gavrilov to relent towards the Chekhovs? Undoubtedly Misha Chokhov had pleaded Pavel’s case. For all the Chokhov hedonism – ‘If you drink, you die, if you don’t drink, you die, so better drink’ – Misha and his siblings were amiable.
Pavel made decisions and paid off minor creditors, such as the old family nurse. He fantasized about becoming rich. At the end of 1877 he had decided: ‘Antosha! When you finish studying at the Taganrog gimnazia, you must join the Medical faculty, for which you have our blessing. Aleksandr’s choice was frivolous against our wishes and so quite unsuccessful.’ In fact Aleksandr excelled in everything from Scripture to Physics, but no longer propitiated a father on whom he did not depend. Now that Pavel spent all day and most nights at Gavrilov’s, Aleksandr rejoined his mother, his siblings and the dog. Anton, unlike Aleksandr, went through the motions of consultation. Even Kolia’s art won Pavel’s approval. In January 1878 he told Anton: ‘We desire you to have the character of your brother Kolia! … by his behaviour he has won good comrades … Nothing in the world cheers us now, we have just one consolation, our children, if they are good.’3
Pavel fought any wilfulness in his offspring. Anton had written about his ‘convictions’ and at the end of January Pavel responded with irony: ‘Our own convictions feed us no bread, which is why I work for Mr Gavrilov according to his convictions.’ Pavel embarrassed Anton by asking Father Pokrovsky to protect the boy. He devised ploys for buying back the family house. He conceded that Selivanov might never let the house revert, but perhaps he could retrieve his lost capital. To Mitrofan and Liudmila Pavel wrote:
So, my dear Brother, if I can buy back our house perhaps with the money collected for Mt Athos monastery and the income from the house can be the interest for the loan, when business in Taganrog improves and a starting price can be named, then ask permission to sell it.4
Mitrofan quashed the idea almost by return of post:
the Athos fathers’ money kept in the Taganrog branch of the State bank is held solely by Father Filaret to be sent to Odessa … But father Filaret, for all his kindness, finds joy in the miseries of those who do not live as he does … I shall tell him frankly that I am trading badly, not covering my expenses, so that he does not reproach me for not helping you …
Egor’s 1878 New Year letter to Pavel is gruesome:
Your mother, Pavel, has been suffering for nearly two years with an untreatable illness, neither her arms nor her legs work, not only was her body withered, but her bones are like splinters, she lies in bed not moving, moreover recently she has a disease of the head, the tumour on her face is like a pillow and there are water blisters and now she cannot see the light of heaven. She is suffering and I am struck down by exhaustion of spirit and strength, she repeatedly asks God for death, but the hour for her soul to depart has not come, she is fed and watered by strangers, when there is no kin, in this grief she often calls on the Lord, she rails, groans day and night, like a fish against the ice, she recalls past happiness, and the present is not happy, she says ‘I gave birth to children and saw them, but they are no more, they have scattered over the face of the earth, now they would help me and pity me in my great need.’
On 26 February 1878, nearly eighty years old, Efrosinia died – of smallpox, it is reported. Efrosinia’s death broke Egor. That summer, at the age of eighty, he left Countess Platova and visited each of his surviving children and grandchildren in turn: first in Taganrog, then in Kaluga, and in Moscow. In December Egor wrote to Pavel and Evgenia and their children, whose names he confused:
I speak to you perhaps for the last time … as the first cause of your existence on the earth … I have eaten our daily bread from the table of kind, giving gentlemen, my kind children … forget not the sinful Egor in your prayers … console me with your letters while I am here on earth and when I am in the next world and if by God’s mercy I shall be free from deepest hell, I shall write to you from there how sinners live and how the righteous rejoice with the holy angels … now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.
In early 1879 the ‘mobile bronze statue’ went to stay with his daughter in Tverdokhliobovo and died there of a heart attack on 12 March 1879. At nineteen Anton had lost all his grandparents and three of his uncles. Little wonder that cemeteries haunted his dreams and his waking hours.
Others close to him in Taganrog were disappearing. In early May 1878 his cousin Aleksei Dolzhenko left for Moscow to begin, at the age of thirteen, a life of drudgery at Gavrilov’s. After two weeks Aleksei took to Moscow life, while his mother, Fenichka, grieved, for two months alone and chronically ill, in Taganrog. On 31 July, her bags packed by Anton, with presents from Mitrofan and old Egor, Fenichka arrived in Moscow to live with Evgenia. Her sister hesitated, for Fenichka was a ‘grumbler’ and a drain on the house, but when the widow arrived Evgenia was ecstatic: ‘I talk and I cry when I have to tell her about past grief.’ For the next thirteen years the two sisters were almost inseparable, nursing each other, visiting holy relics, cooking and sewing. Pavel was far cooler. He wrote to Anton: ‘Mrs Dolzhenko, arrived … let her not yearn and may she live better than with Aleksei in Taganrog, she has already seen him and upset herself …’
Selivanov and the Kravtsovs had by this time become more of a family to Anton than his own. He was now eighteen. He even contemplated taking Sasha Selivanova with him when he went to Moscow and enquired about the curriculum in the girls’ school which Masha was attending. (The Filaret school had compulsory German, strict Religious Knowledge, and no dancing – to the dismay of a vivacious Cossack girl like Sasha Selivanova.) Despite all his extra-curricular work, Anton’s marks in May 1878 were excellent. He rejected his mother’s pleas to join the family that summer. He roamed the steppes around Ragozina Gully with Petia Kravtsov and gun dogs.
Life in Moscow was less harrowing now that Pavel had found work. Aleksandr and Kolia socialized with the demi-monde of Moscow. By March 1878 Aleksandr had left his ‘ungodly’ wife. Pavel was overjoyed and called him Sashenka again, but Aleksandr’s ‘room’ was occupied by a tenant. Despite Pavel’s long absences, the family found a new subject for quarrelling. On 17 March 1878 Aleksandr told Anton:
Vania simply rages. Yesterday he virtually thrashed mother and when father is there he turned out to be such an angel that I still can’t get over my astonishment. He really is a nasty piece of work, brother! … He answered that he doesn’t have to work, that his affairs are none of his mother’s business and that he has to be fed, cared for and nurtured because he was summoned from Taganrog to Moscow!!! …
Vania, now seventeen, gravitated away from school to his elder brothers’ bohemian life. He went carriage-riding; he serenaded girls. In April 1879 he failed his examinations. Masha also had to retake a year, Misha only just scraped through, and even Kolia failed History of the Christian Church. Kolia was on the road to fame; Aleksandr had returned to the fold, but Vania, Kolia complained to Anton,
is trouble. He can’t walk past without punching Masha or Misha in the neck … You can’t get through to Vania with preaching, he just does nothing, despite the unbearable family quarrels which he is the only reason for … we have rows, violence … I get myself a room which I obviously pay for, and now Vania has moved in with me …
He was in real danger
of servitude, for Pavel now proposed to put him in a factory. Mimicking the parental tone, Kolia copied out an interminable letter to their father:
What’s the point of him working two years at a factory and then being recruited for six years as a soldier? … if he is a workman, this reflects badly on you … what will he do with his limited pay? … No, Papa!5
Vania was too big to thrash. In May Pavel reprimanded his errant son:
Recently you have become useless, idle and disobedient … How many times have I asked you … your conscience is asleep … you come home at midnight, you sleep the sleep of the dead until noon … With God’s help and blessing try to find yourself a job in Moscow in a Factory or in a Shop … the Iron foundry or a Technical Institute.6
Vania was saved in 1879 by being examined and passed, thanks to Mikhail Diukovsky, a teacher and close friend of Aleksandr and Kolia. Vania was transformed from lout into student-teacher. Pavel was delighted.
Kolia was to be in more serious trouble. He was only interested in finding a studio where his models could pose for him. He never bothered to register with the military for exemption. He asked Anton to send the necessary papers from Taganrog to Rostov-on-the-Don, but Anton replied only with jokes about him being conscripted. The worse the rows, the more the family longed for Anton, the one member of the family never to shout, hit out or weep. Kolia promised his father: ‘You and Mama will be considerate to each other, our submissive brother Anton will come and we shall live, thank God, a glorious life.’
Anton Chekhov Page 9